Not only was Forbidden Planet (1956) a key film in the development of the science-fiction genre, it was also the first film of any kind to use an entirely electronic musical score, composed by Bebe and Louis Barron. In the 1950s, this was quite a feat, considering that analog synthesizers were not yet available on the consumer market.

A pair of composers who married in 1947, the Barrons spent their early careers experimenting with the techniques of musique concrète, a composition style that uses recorded sounds as raw material. By following equations found in mathematician Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Louis Barron was able to build electronic circuits to generate sound. This sound was further manipulated by the Barrons using reverb, delay, filters, and tape manipulations.

It’s impossible to talk about synth scores, or scores in general for that matter, without citing Wendy Carlos’s soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s ultraviolent masterpiece A Clockwork Orange (1971). The film’s opening shot—a slow zoom out from a close-up on Malcolm McDowell’s eerie smirk—will forever be etched in my memory, thanks largely to the music with which it’s paired: Carlos’s synthesized version of Henry Purcell’s “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.”

Wendy Carlos is the synth pioneer of synth pioneers. Her debut album, Switched-On Bach, took the world by storm when it was released in 1968. It contained a collection of pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach performed entirely on the newly developed Moog synthesizer, and would go on to win the Grammy Award for Best Classical Album in 1970. With Switched-On Bach, Carlos deployed synthesizers in a context that had been mainly reserved for orchestral instruments, thus changing the world’s perception of electronic music. To mainstream listeners, Moog-laced versions of Bach’s classics presented the idea that synthesizers were more than just experimental tools. They might just be instruments to be taken seriously, as seriously as a piano or violin.

After the success of that album, Carlos was working on a new piece entitled “Timesteps” when a friend sent her a copy of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, soon to be the basis for Kubrick’s film. The book resonated with Carlos so much that “Timesteps” would evolve into an “autonomous composition with an uncanny affinity for Clockwork,” as she described it in the liner notes to the soundtrack album on which it eventually appeared. After learning that production had wrapped on Kubrick’s film adaptation, Wendy and her longtime partner, Rachel Elkind, mailed Kubrick a recording of “Timesteps” along with a version of the choral movement from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Suffice it to say, Kubrick would call back and the scoring process would begin (they’d even work together again, a decade later, on The Shining). “Timesteps” appears very briefly when Alex is strapped to a chair undergoing the Ludovico Technique. Carlos’s haunting, synthesized renditions of Beethoven and Rossini contribute to the film’s dystopian, uncanny tone. The music feels both familiar and unfamiliar, accentuating Kubrick’s constant juxtaposition of elegance and violence.

Assault on Precinct 13

John Carpenter is not only one of genre cinema’s greatest writer-directors, he has also scored most of his own films. He even edited Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) under the pseudonym John T. Chance—the name of John Wayne’s character in Rio Bravo (1959). That Howard Hawks film was one of the key inspirations for this gritty action thriller, made for a budget of less than $100K.

Carpenter wrote the score for Assault on Precinct 13 in one day, with assistance from synth programmer Dan Wyman. The main theme, which repeats throughout the film, combines a stark, pulsating bass line composed on an Oberheim synth—known for its warm, analog sounds—with a drum machine and detuned pad-like synthesizer. It is extremely easy to get stuck in your head, and the perfect soundtrack for driving around Los Angeles at night.

When I interviewed Carpenter two years ago, I asked him if he remembered the first time he heard a synthesizer. He said, “I think I first heard it on [Wendy Carlos’s] Switched-On Bach,” and went on, “But I don’t know if that was the first; I heard a movie score that was all electronic. It was called Forbidden Planet and it was astonishing to me.”

Lacking the budget for orchestras or musicians when he first started out, Carpenter was drawn to the possibilities of DIY electronic scoring. As he puts it, synthesizers allow you to “sound big with just a keyboard.” Building on the innovations of Wendy Carlos and Bebe and Louis Barron before him, John Carpenter’s music proved to be pivotal for the use of synthesizers in film scores, blazing a trail for filmmaker-musicians like David Lynch and Bertrand Bonello who went on to use synths to soundtrack their own work.

Space Is the Place

If you know anything about Sun Ra, you know that he came from the planet Saturn and was put on Earth to preach peace. He has no age. He came from another dimension, dropped down here from outer space like the rain and the snow. The legendary jazz composer, bandleader, poet, and synthesist was known for his cosmic philosophy. Born Herman Poole Blount, he lived and breathed as Sun Ra, an extraterrestrial being whose early adoption of the synthesizer reflected the ahead-of-its-time Afrofuturist vision he espoused.

Directed by John Coney and written by Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (1974) was inspired in part by the latter’s 1971 Berkeley lectures, “The Black Man in the Cosmos.” In the film, Sun Ra and his Arkestra lead an intergalactic movement to resettle Black people in space. At the opening of the film, he muses about how to accomplish this: “We bring them here through either isotope teleportation, trasport liquidation, or better still, teleport the whole planet here through music.” This last option is his preferred medium of travel, a form of advanced knowledge capable of bridging different dimensions and transcending the limitations of Earth.

Throughout Space is the Place, the Minimoog—one of the first commercial synthesizers—makes several appearances both sonically and visually. The synth’s cosmic tones combined with its futuristic, knob-laden exterior make it the perfect instrument for an interplanetary artist. It both sounds like it’s from space and fits right in as the cockpit control panel on Sun Ra’s spaceship. Bob Moog, the device’s inventor, himself loaned Sun Ra a prototype Minimoog (Model B), several months before the commercial Minimoog (Model D) became available in 1970. Ra kept both models—they both appear in the film—and was among the first to make extensive use of the instrument.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

Ryuichi Sakamoto first rose to prominence in the late seventies and early eighties as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra. Alongside his bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto helped pave the way for several electronic music genres—from synthpop and techno to video-game music—inspiring generations of synthesists to come.

Sakamoto’s first film score was for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), directed by Nagisa Oshima. In the musician’s inaugural acting role, he also stars as Captain Yonoi, the commander of a POW camp in Japanese-occupied Java. David Bowie plays Major Jack Celliers, an imprisoned British officer who becomes an object of obsession for his captor. The two great artists share an undeniable on-screen chemistry that the score flawlessly elevates.